Neverending story

Page Tools

The history of cinema is littered with unfinished projects. Here are four films which should have been destined for greatness but failed to make it to the screen.

Erich von Stroheim's Queen Kelly

In 1928, Erich Von Stroheim began work on Queen Kelly, an opulent five-hour epic starring Gloria Swanson. It should have been silent cinema's crowning achievement. Instead, it was one of the greatest of all lost films.

Von Stroheim developed Queen Kelly for Swanson's newly created production company which was bankrolled by her lover, Joseph Kennedy. The story is a mix of naive romance and grim tale of moral degradation: on the eve of his wedding to mad Queen Regina V of Kronberg, Prince Wolfram seduces a convent girl (Swanson). When the pair are discovered by the queen, he is imprisoned and she ends up in a brothel in Africa.

For Von Stroheim, this was an opportunity to redeem his reputation as a tyrannical and profligate director. However, one-third of the way through the story, Kennedy and Swanson pulled the plug on the production, worried about the increasing budget and filming delays, and disturbed by the lurid turn that the film was taking.

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Orson Welles's Don Quixote

Although Orson Welles left a myriad incomplete films during his 50 years in cinema, Don Quixote was his most enduring passion. He began filming in 1955 and continued in Mexico, Spain and Italy over the following decades, bringing together the cast and crew whenever he could raise the finance. Indeed, Welles was still talking about finishing the film months before his death in 1985.

Don Quixote was Welles's great obsession. The film mutated countless times over the years. Unable or unwilling to finish it, Welles continued proliferating images and stories, not unlike the style of Cervantes's book. All that was left at the end of Welles's life was 300,000 feet of film footage poorly organised and distributed around the world.

Alfred Hitchcock's Kaleidoscope

In the mid-1960s, with his career at a low ebb, Alfred Hitchcock worked on a groundbreaking film that would have represented a radical change in his style.

Kaleidoscope was the story of a serial rapist and killer. There would be several murders, including an attempt on the life of a decoy policewoman - an idea that particularly excited Hitchcock - and a Psycho-style stabbing. And the director intended to use story details from infamous UK criminal cases (including an acid bath murderer and a necrophile).

MCA studios turned the film down. They thought that the protagonist was too "ugly", a decision that rankled with Hitchcock for the rest of his life.

Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon

In 1968, Kubrick embarked on one of his most ambitious and personal projects: an epic biography of Napoleon Bonaparte with Jack Nicholson playing the emperor.

The director worked for two years on the film, immersing himself with a team of researchers in a minute analysis of the Napoleonic era, developing a day-by-day account of court life and a catalogue of 15,000 images.

In 1969, however, MGM studios baulked at the cost of Kubrick's epic, despite the unprecedented success of his film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick went to Warner Bros, where he made A Clockwork Orange, but he never gave up hope for Napoleon.